Word: bulgarians
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...Everyone who knows me knows that I do not speak English," insisted Sergei Antonov, in his native Bulgarian. That disclaimer by the trembling, white- faced defendant came in response to pointed questioning by Judge Severino Santiapichi last week at the four-month-old trial in Rome of Antonov and six other defendants; they are accused of conspiring with Turkish Gunman Mehmet Ali Agca to assassinate Pope John Paul II in St. Peter's Square four years ago. The question of Antonov's linguistic skills is considered vital to the , prosecution's case because Agca has said that he communicated with...
...however, Gorbachev's message is clear enough: Toe the line. Todor Zhivkov of Bulgaria last year had scheduled a trip to Western Europe in the interest of fostering closer relations with non-Communist countries. He abruptly canceled those plans after Gorbachev, acting for the ailing Chernenko, hurriedly visited the Bulgarian capital, Sofia, in December to confer with Zhivkov and, presumably, communicate Soviet displeasure. In dealing with the West, and the U.S. specifically, Gorbachev has not altered the line pursued by his predecessors in any substantive way. He has, however, taken a different approach to the atmospherics of the superpower relationship...
Agca offered other testimony last week that probably unsettled some Communist capitals: Co-Defendant Zhelio Vassilev, a former Bulgarian military attache in Rome who is being tried in absentia, had worked out a plot to mislead investigators into thinking that Agca had acted alone in St. Peter's Square. When Agca was seized in the square, he was carrying a letter stating that the motive for shooting the Pope to protest U.S. and Soviet imperialism. "(Vassilev) suggested that I write (the letter) because in the event of capture it would be useful to give the impression of a lone killer...
Twice during the week Agca elaborated on his earlier claim that the papal shooting had been commissioned for about $1.3 million by "Malenkov," whom he | identified as the first secretary of the Soviet embassy in the Bulgarian capital of Sofia. Ten months before the assassination attempt, Agca said, he, Celik and two other Turks attended a strategy meeting in Room 911 of the Hotel Vitosha in Sofia at which Malenkov was present. "(Malenkov) said, 'Have you changed your mind about killing the Pope?' I said no, and he told me the reward would be 3 million marks," Agca testified...
...earlier testimony, were tainted by reversals and errors. He said that the mysterious Soviet diplomat who purportedly put up the more than $1 million to kill the Pope went by the name of "Milenkov or Malenkov." During pretrial testimony, however, Agca had identified one "Malenkov" as a Bulgarian spy who had introduced him to a Soviet attache in Tehran in 1980. More baffling still, in January 1984 Agca said he had invented both Malenkov and the Soviet official. Last week Agca described the bombing of the radio stations as having taken place in late 1980; the stations were actually attacked...